I really wanted to write about August today. I love August, and being from Memphis, TN, it is a month like no other in any time or place I’ve ever been.
And I have been trying to rest, to find a place of sabbath and renewal. I am acutely aware that my spirit is tired and needs some care.
But the ugliness of the world keeps gnawing at me, and anyone reading this knows that I face this when it happens. To do otherwise has proven toxic for me, and perhaps I have more to say about rabid misogyny and racism being passed off as Christian public policy before I actually CAN rest for a bit.
Today it was the utterly vile law passed by the State of Indiana, but this was just the latest of many.
In May when the imminent overturning of Roe v Wade was leaked, I was shocked and nauseated and furious. A friend, a black woman who is a fellow preacher and political activist, began to post on her social media outlets some of the outrage I was feeling as an ordained minister of the Gospel.
I discovered immediately that the fury and fear was not only for the countless numbers of women and girls who would be harmed nor for the foundational crack in our legal articulation of American privacy. I was just as angry about how my faith was being abused for frankly evil purposes.
I reached out to my friend whose writing had so aligned with my own, and asked her if she’d like to write an article together. I knew it would help me to collaborate with a trusted colleague, a woman whose love-based-justice ethic was very similar to mine but whose take on all of it would be very different. We managed to weave our thoughts together and much to its credit, Baptist Global News published the piece.
We are angry, but I think it is obvious that we’ve both been angry about the co-option of our faith for a long time.
The thing is, I know I watched this happen. I mean, I can’t put my finger on a moment when I became aware that all of a sudden, the litmus test for my Christianity wasn’t my church attendance, my personal actions or practices, my ability to forgive or find compassion but rather whether or not I believed abortion was murder.
I’d grown accustomed to my status as a Christian being challenged at regular intervals by my Evangelical or more conservative mainline friends. (Mainline Protestants are the ones you’ve heard of: Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, et cetera) Being a leftist Christian in the American South was always a tussle, and I started getting kicked out of (conservative) bible studies in my mid-teen years. I was in leadership in my own youth group systems.
I did what I think most of us did as well -I ignored the right-winged Christian media as a general rule. I found its music simplistic and vapid, its theology foreign and constructed, its personalities offensive and loud.
But I didn’t ignore our national media, and I became more and more uncomfortable with what I thought of as sloppy reporting, the lumping together of fringe right-winged beliefs as definitively Christian. The associations became more typical, but I still remember being surprised when I discovered a few years ago that the IRS would associate any pro-life or pro-choice language automatically as faith-based statements rather than policy ones.
Now we are starting to see that there was an intentional campaign to take over the American Evangelical movement and use it as a political weapon. Religion has been used to control populations for as long as it has existed, but people of faith and intentional communities have also continually reformed and countered these forces. It is radically irresponsible to not be able to acknowledge the harm that has been done, not only by the church but by every organized faith system at some point.
It is still confounding to me how this happened for the day to day Evangelical, however. How did this orchestrated campaign manage to shift the focus of an entire faith system away from any of the practices associated with that faith just decades ago and make this wholesale replacement?
American Evangelicals stole a portion of the Catholic articulation of the sacredness of life and used it as a bludgeon, a weapon of fear and control. Once established, that (secret) foothold into the language and and theology of Catholicism became acceptable and normative. All of it was fair game now, and Evangelicals became flooded with talk of spiritual warfare with angels and demons.
I say a secret foothold because in my experience, few Evangelicals or right-winged Christians know any Catholics, and tend to believe some pretty appalling things about them. I’ve certainly had some fascinating iconoclastic conversations with these kinds of Christians about what types of things carry for them a sense of catholicism. It’s usually candles, which have been a point of contention for centuries, but they will show me their “prayer beads” without any sense of irony about those being a simplified rosary.
And sure. This is in part what all Christian communities have done over time, this adaptation and shifting and taking practices from other communities. In theological studies, this process is called liturgical acculturation and is quite different in its healthy and generative forms.
This use of catholic sensibilities about life, however, comes with none of its accompanying beliefs, those linked within catholic belief. For example, this sacredness of life ethic extends to being staunchly against capital punishment, which is certainly no part of the current right wing belief system. They extend that to care for Creation, as seen in the Pope’s Laudato Si. While some Evangelicals such as the Evangelical Environmental Network are attempting to take that “tend the garden” command from God literally, this is also far from normative in right leaning Houses of Worship.
These places used to at least support the lives of the poor, but that has fallen away as the primary focus has become this campaign that in implementation will harm the poor most of all.
I have no idea how to move forward with any of this, what to do with my fury, nor how to shift the popular understanding of Christianity back to something biblical and recognizable within its 2,000 year history.
But just getting some of this anger and confusion out of my brain has helped. I welcome comments and reflections on anything that I write, so feel free to contribute. We post a weekly newsletter, which is a smaller community, so please feel free to subscribe to that and join us there as well. I do not relish unilateral action, and prefer to work collaboratively. So perhaps gathering is what is needed, so that those of us who feel as I do, as Stephany Spaulding Rose does, as many clergy and people of faith do, can know that we are not alone. That we can build a movement and change the landscape. That we can empower each other to speak out more often.
May it be so.